Seamless Switching in Multi-Rate Video Streaming Systems: A Wavelet-Based Scheme Versus the SP-Frame Scheme

The multiple bit-rate (MBR) representation of video sequences offers an effective solution to video streaming services over the Internet. To facilitate such MBR-based streaming services, a mechanism is required to support seamless switching among multiple bit-streams when a bandwidth change is detected. The SP-frames developed in H.264 provide such a mechanism at each pre-selected switching point. In this paper, we propose a new switching scheme that is based on a wavelet-domain processing of the reconstructed frame at each switching point. We will compare our scheme with the SP-frame scheme in aspects such as the quality drop at each switching point and all subsequent frames, the count of overhead bits to support an arbitrary switching, and the computational complexity. The results indicate that our scheme can achieve the seamless switching with a better rate-distortion performance at cost of slightly increasing the computations at the decoder side